In my 41 years, I’ve never come across apple jam. Only apple jelly and apple butter.
Grape is so common largely because it’s cheap, and is often sold as jelly, but in my experience, grape jam is just as cheap. And jam is immeasurably better. I can’t figure out why anyone would buy grape jelly if grape jam is just as available.
My favorite is blackberry, usually sold as preserves. It’s hard to find the “seeded” (non-seedless) variety, but it’s so much better than the seedless that I stock up when I come across some. You just can’t beat blackberry preserves with seeds. Yum.
Must be the region of the US, Chronos–orange marmalade is popular in Arizona and Pennsylvania, the two states I’m most familiar with. Blackcurrant preserves, though, are imports in my area (as are ginger preserves, which I just love!).
As far as most popular jams, I think strawberry comes first, followed by blackberry and boysenberry. Grape is perhaps the only really popular jelly, due to the PBJ (which is the only reason I buy grape jelly at all–hate the taste of it otherwise).
Apple butter is wonderful, but I haven’t seen peach butter outside of Pennsylvania.
Hmmm…I actually don’t know what “apple butter” is. And, yes, I am an American, although my background is colored by my Polish heritage and Polish vocabulary for food items. Anyhow, it seems that apple butter and apple jam are the same thing. At least this site says so. The only difference I can tell is that apple butter appears to have spices added to it, which I would never add to my homemade apple jam. Then again, the other recipes I’ve seen for apple jam do contain cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and the such, so I think the reasonable conclusion is that apple butter=apple jam. You say tomayto, I say tomahto.
As for juicyness and making jam, plums,apricots, blackberries and strawberries are a lot juicer than apples, yet there’s no problem in making jam out of them. (I have a site for the strawberries and apples. And apricots and blackberries.) You can even make jam out of watermelon (!).
The initial water content of your fruit has little to do with the jam making process. In my experience, I’ve found I usually need to add a little water to most fruit to keep it from burning in the initial stages. After that, you just add sugar and wait until it gels.
Plus, pear has about the same water content as apple (83.2%) and I suspect rhubarb has more %age water by composition than apples as well. At least from my experience it seems rhubarb makes a sloppier wetter mess than apples do.
Apple butter and apple jam are similar, though not the same. Apple butter is perfectly smooth, spiced, and cooked so long it turns a lovely shade of brown. I ate quite a bit of it on bread or toast, growing up in Pennsylvania. Apple jam can be (and around here usually is) chunky, has little if any spice, and is cooked for a shorter time so it’s the same yellow color as the flesh of the apples it was made from. Both are seedless, as apple seeds are bitter (and can kill you if you eat enough at one sitting, but that’s another story).
Oh!!! Yes, I do know what apple butter is! I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection before, as I’m pretty well-acquainted with something called “rosehip butter” which is pretty much rosehips boiled down to a smooth, buttery consistency, not quite like jam. I just never knew what it was called, but it describes exactly what you’ve mentioned. Apple jam still has chunks of fruit in it, but apple butter is smoother and, well, more butter-like.
There is another type of fruit preserve which seems only to be available here in the UK . This is lemon curd ( or lemon cheese ) which is a sort of thick yellow paste. It can be spread on bread but is more usually baked in tarts or flans. I personally hate the stuff mainly because I was once forced to eat some at school lunch by a very uncaring teacher when I was seven years old . Mind you I did get my revenge by that afternoon by spectacularly throwing up in the class-room. On the subject of marmalade the best sort is made with bitter Seville oranges. We make our own and in my opinion is much better than the store bought sorts.
Thanks for the info, pulykamell–ya learn something new every day!
We had a few apple trees on the farm and the ones that were just not good eating or cooking apples–bruised, soft, windfalls, etc.–went for two purposes: my Mama made apple butter out of some, and Daddy took the rest down to the cider press. He always kept some juice aside for apple jelly, and the rest got fermented.
Rayne Man, I’ve seen imported lemon curd but never bought any. Thanks for the warning!
I’ve many relatives in western PA (Johnstown, mostly), and I spent four years at school in Philadelphia, and I hardly ever saw orange marmelade in either area-- I just figured that it was mostly a British thing. And the currant preserves I have are, in fact, from PA (homemade by one of the afore-mentioned relatives). My point was, though, that orange marmelade specificially is usually given its own category.
And apple butter is usually unspiced, in my experience, but it goes well with other spiced things like cinammon bread. Basically, it goes well with the same sort of spices as apple pie or sauce: Cinammon, nutmeg, allspice, etc.
Mmmm…peach butter! I’ve never seen it in the store (in Missouri) but I made some last summer. Gods, that was good stuff!
When I’ve made jam, I’ve always used a box of pectin, and not cooked it very long–IIRC, the recipe told me to bring the fruit and sugar to a boil, add pectin, and cook it for, I think, one or two minutes at a rolling boil. Then it was straight into the jars. I imagine the process for apple jam would be the same. It was still pourable when it went into the jars, and set up as they cooled. And actually, the box of pectin has a recipe for “freezer jam” that requires no cooking, and you don’t can it, you freeze it. I made it the first year I made strawberry jam, and it was very good, more fresh fruit tasting than regular jam.
The peach butter, on the other hand, was just food-milled peaches and sugar simmered and simmered and simmered (and simmered!) until they reduced to the consistency you wanted. Mmm, concentrated peaches! But it took awhile, and it was very hot work, stirring the whole time. The recipes I’ve seen for apple butter are similar.
Oh, and while marmalade isn’t really insanely popular here, it is easily available at the grocery store, so somebody must be buying it.
My grandmother gave me several jars of home canned apple buttter. I remeber the apple butter seh made when I was a kid it was wonderful. BUT this was different. I got it home and spread some on toast and bit in and gagged. It was horrid and the after taste!!! water or ice tea would not purge me of the awfulness. I called her up and sweetly asked for her recipe as I was sure it was not the one I had. She was glad I liked it and surprized I had noticed the difference. THis stuff was not made from apples, cinnamon and sugar but instead, zuchinni, nutmeg and sugar twin. Ghastly.
Marmalade in America: I suspect it depends on how Anglophilic your family is.
Mine was…very. I grew up on recordings of Boris Karloff reading Kipling and Vivian Leigh reading Beatrix Potter. And marmalade, Dundee’s, I think. I remember my mom always kept a couple of empty pots around - the old-fashioned ones with the locking covers, so useful for storing sewing notions and whatnot.
“Lemon Curd,” at least the name, is something I’ve only seen as an import. But a slightly less dense analogue is sold here as either lemon pudding (meaning boiled custard) or lemon pie filling (meaning boiled custard with a B.A. in marketing).
On the butter front: my parents now live in Frederick, Maryland, home of the McCutcheon’s company, purveyors of peach butter and an exceedingly tasty (if somewhat runny, it’s more of a sauce) pumpkin butter. Great stuff.
